At the Mercy of the Host

When you are invited to someone’s home, you are at the mercy of the host, or sometimes the hostess. It is their food, their drink and you must act as if you are grateful, even if the food is not that great and the wine is cheap. We twist that word mercy here a bit. We don’t really mean they grant us mercy. We mean that they might be mean, or miserly, if they wish. But we hope that the host is kind and generous.

Here we are at the mercy of our host, God, the Father. We are thankful that He is both generous and kind. His kindness brought us here when we had no claim on Him at all. In fact, without His mercy, we could never have come to this Table. 

And He is also generous. He might have invited us in and then just given us a little morsel of bread and a little sip of wine. But that is not what He did. Instead, He seated us at His High Table in the seat of honor next to His own dear Son. He gave us all the privileges of His Son, who is the heir to the throne of grace. And He made us joint heirs with Christ that we might receive all the blessings of His Kingdom as His own dear children. What a privilege to be at the mercy of our host.